10 Thrillers About Unethical Technology to Read

A good tech thriller takes a familiar promise - safety, connection, efficiency, better choices - and follows it past the point where a sensible person should probably put their phone in a drawer. Think The Matrix, The Truman Show and Inception: stories where reality becomes unstable, control wears a reassuring smile, and somebody else has been editing the rules.

The corporate villain is often the real star. Not a cackling mastermind in a secret lair, but a company with clean branding, a cheery mission statement and a growth target that somehow requires the removal of human agency. These books are not anti-technology in the “back to candles and carrier pigeons” sense. They ask harder questions. Who owns the data? Who gets to define risk? What happens when a system designed to optimise life decides that people are the inefficient bit?

Here are ten novels for readers who like their suspense clever, unsettling and just plausible enough to make them side-eye the next app update.